Intel is developing its own take on the mini-tablet, with a new ultra-mobile PC platform to be announced at this week's Intel Developer Forum in Beijing. The big surprise? It's based on Linux. In the meantime, Intel announced new details of its forthcoming Santa Rosa PC platform, including a significant revision of the Core 2 Duo chip.

Nokia have not pushed the device particularly hard commercially; they seem to have been pretty clear from the outset that the strategic aim is to create a viable Linux mobile platform. In that sense the project seems to have been fairly successful. There is a chicken and egg situation here: without there being a viable device for linux development there will be no successful open platform. Contrast with this the Motorola approach: writing their own interface to sit on top of Linux with virtually no Linux community around it.

By the way, from what I can tell the N770/N800 are far from being unusable pieces of beta kit. I assume that segedunum you are basing this on actually trying the device and not just on rumour and speculation?

Oh dear, the always predictable segetroll, if is mono related or something remarking the success or GNOME/GTK you will magictly appear, I wonder if you are an employee of Trolltech or some troll with no life at all, I think are both, btw, how was the last #kde-promo meeting?

by 'viable' I mean: with a decent open source community around it. The success of the 770 has been the success of building the maemo community.

I think that Nokia has realised, astutely, that there isn't any value in open source unless you can create a community around the platform -- otherwise you may as well just do proprietary development in house. Contrast with the 'launch and forget' approach of Sharp with the Zaurus.

You have to recognise a basic chicken and egg problem with open source mobile platforms: if there is no device that can be used to develop the platform then there will be no community around it. What you end up with is things like Qtopia that are developed more or less entirely in house and, as a result, might as well be a proprietary platform.

Then you just haven't used one, or you have a lot of emotion invested in it as several people seem to have ;-

As opposed to your own emotional investment in deriding anything Gtk, Gnome or Mono related at every possible opportunity?

You certainly seem to have a remarkably negative attitude to what seems, on the face of it, to be encouraging developments. The fact that it's not a commercial success now -- if that is a fact, something you've consistently failed to produce evidence of -- doesn't mean that it won't be a success long term.